Everything You Need to Know About Pitti Uomo, Where Menswear Is Made

Pitti Uomo is the biannual fashion circus that comes to Florence, Italy between stops in London and Milan for the men’s fashion season. It’s a trade show in the most basic sense, but there’s no convention center. Instead, hundreds of the best menswear brands in the world occupy the Fortezzj de Basso, a 14th century fort that occupies a 100,000 square meter foot print in the city. To many, Pitti is the Super Bowl of modern street style, where men with elaborate wardrobes and too much confidence go to have their pictures taken while pretending to have important conversations on their phones and with each other.

But for this edition of the fair, the focus was shifted away from the camera-thirsty sartorialites, and onto the indelible squadron of super-high impact designers brought to Florence to present their collections as guests of Pitti Uomo, among them, Visvim designer Hiroki Nakamura, Gosha Rubchinskiy, and actual fashion god Raf Simons. Pitti invites designers every season to present runways shows as a much needed reprieve from the booths of the fair, but this time around the stars aligned like never before, and suddenly if felt like Florence, not London or Milan or even Paris, was the place to see menswear at it’s absolute most alive.

Here, a recap of what may have been the best Pitti ever.

Gosha Rubchinskiy##

Somehow the Russian designer managed to find the most Russian looking place in all of Florence—an abandoned tobacco factory—to present an epic collection with a surprising and very deliberate Florentine flavor. There were six new collaborations—including iconic Italian sportswear brands Fila, Kappa, Sergio Tacchini, as well as Levi’s, Superga and Retrosuperfuture. Gosha even threw a few suited looks into the mix, seemingly as a nod to the town’s tradition of tailoring. The models, however, looked cast from an eastern European juvenile detention center from the 1990s—an unnerving bunch who wore the clothes well. It wasn’t a radical departure for the buzzy designer, but it was a well-calibrated expression of Gosha at his best—boxy suits, nostalgic graphics, and menacing attitude.

Visvim##

Designer Hiroki Nakamura built a cult brand that’s grown into an industry leader by pulling the best of vintage Americana—from the wild west to World War II—and mashed it up with meticulous Japanese craftsmanship. Now imagine that presented in physical form as a runway show cum 1950’s rock ’n roll performance, jive-dancing sailors and all. The clothes and footwear were what you’d expected from Visvim—simple and familiar, but meticulously designed to look that way—lots of perfectly faded denim and variations on the kimono, plus a few new moves from Hiroki, including flowy trousers and three-piece suits.

Raf Simons##

All eyes are on Raf. Since the Belgian designer left his role as creative director of Dior he’s been solely focused on his namesake line (amidst rumors that he will soon be appointed the top spot designing for Calvin Klein). Fashion heads go crazy for the Raf Simons archive, and some of them exploded when they arrived at the Stazione Leopolda to see over 200 mannequins scattered throughout styled in the designer’s past collections. Models lapped the space wearing the Spring 2017 collection—a collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which featured many of the legendary photographer’s iconic works printed on garments, including a few rather heroic examples of the male anatomy. Those images should have come as a shock to no one, and to be honest, Mapplethorpe’s dicks were much less distasteful than a lot of the desperate show boating you see from men hanging out at the fair. The clothes were Raf at his best—exaggerated proportions on top with precisely cut trousers and Raf Simons x adidas slides with black socks on the bottom.

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